‘You'll kill patient trust if you let doctors help suicides’

Share via

Physician-assisted suicide as a means of ending chronic illness and suffering threatens to destroy the relationship between doctors and patients, and would cause a moral crisis in the National Health Service, a leading specialist in palliative care has declared.

David Jeffrey, a former chairman of the ethics committee of the Association for Palliative Medicine, was speaking a week after Baroness Warnock told The Times that Britain should take an “unsentimental view” of its 700,000 Alzheimer’s sufferers.